Saturday, 30 March 2013

The continued cold weather may be sapping our spirits but there's always the possible consolation of unusual winter visitors to the garden. This morning we had fifteen redpolls in, drawn by niger seeds spilled onto the ground by the messy-eating goldfinches. My wife noticed that there was a collection of ground feeding birds that were something out of the ordinary, so we reached for the binoculars and camera. Redpolls are enchanting little birds, beautifully coloured, and this is certainly the first time I've had such a good view of them.

Tuesday, 26 March 2013

PDF proofs of Harvest of Time have arrived, meaning that the book is now all but nailed down. UK publication is June, so only a few months away. Here's the back cover copy, to give you a hint of the story:After billions of years of imprisonment, the vicious
Sild have broken out of confinement. From a ruined world at the end of
time, they make preparations to conquer the past, with the ultimate goal
of rewriting history. But to achieve their aims they will need to
enslave an intellect greater than their own...

On Earth,
UNIT is called in to investigate a mysterious incident on a North Sea
drilling platform. The Doctor believes something is afoot, and no sooner
has the investigation begun when something even stranger takes hold:
The Brigadier is starting to forget about UNIT's highest-profile
prisoner. And he is not alone in his amnesia.

As the Sild
invasion begins, the Doctor faces a terrible dilemma. To save the
universe, he must save his arch-nemesis... The Master.

Monday, 18 March 2013

I've written a story entitled "A Map of Mercury", which will appear in Pandemonium: The Lowest Heaven, an original anthology of stories to be published in June in partnership with the Royal Observatory Greenwich and related to celestial bodies in the solar system. You can read a bit more about the book here:

"The Happiest Place on [Expletive Deleted] Venus" by Archie Black (Venus)

"The Krakatoan" by Maria Dahvana Headley (Earth)

"An account of a voyage from World to World again, by way of the Moon, 1726" by Adam Roberts (The Moon)

"WWBD" by Simon Morden (Mars)

"Saga's Children" by E.J. Swift (Ceres)

"The Jupiter Files" by Jon Courtenay Grimwood (Jupiter)

"Magnus Lucretius" by Mark Charan Newton (Europa)

"Air, Water and the Grove" by Kaaron Warren (Saturn)

"Only Human" by Lavie Tidhar (Titan)

"Uranus" by Esther Saxey (Uranus)

"From This Day Forward" by David Bryher (Neptune)

"We'll Always Be Here" by S.L. Grey (Pluto & Charon)

"Enyo-Enyo" by Kameron Hurley (Eris)

"The Comet's Tale" by Matt Jones (Halley's Comet)

"The Grand Tour" by James Smythe (Voyager I)

Looks rather enticing, doesn't it? My story deals with an art broker's attempts to negotiate with a bohemian "Cyborg Artistic Collective" living on the surface of Mercury and was inspired, in a small way, by the giant sculptural installations of the Burning Man festival.

Tuesday, 12 March 2013

These three unpublished vignettes - flashbacks in the life of the character Quillon - were written for my novel Terminal World but omitted in final edits as they did not fit neatly into the structure of the book, as well as adding 8000 words to what was already a bulky text. Nonetheless, I've always been quite fond of them and hope they are of some interest to those who have read the novel. Feel free to pick up on any typos or errors in the comments - they have not been proofed, and I have only given the text a cursory read today. All copyright Alastair Reynolds 2009 and 2013.

#1

They fly together. It will be the last time, before their
wings must be cut away. They orbit the glittering spire of the Celestial
Levels, braiding trajectories through the air, giddy on the delicious warm
thermals winding up from the lower reaches of Spearpoint. The sky is a
cloudless mauve and the lights of the city look very beautiful this evening. He
watches her body flex on the wind, cusping the air in the translucence of her
wings, so skilled at finding the right line that she hardly ever needs to beat
her wings, and never needs to use the propulsion unit fixed at the base of her
spine. He cannot match her agility, her elegance, and he does not even try. He
is a competent flier, even a good one, but she is a true daughter of the air,
angelic in every sense of the word.

‘It was like this when we met,’ he tells her, pushing the
words into her head without the need for speech.

‘You mean when you first saw me,’ she corrects.

‘Yes,’ he admits, for it is true that he watched her from
afar, marvelling at her, hardly daring to imagine that they would one day
become lovers.

‘But it’s colder now,’ she says. ‘I feel it, even with
these warm airs coming up from below. There’s a tang to it. A sharpness that
wasn’t there when we met.’

‘It’s just the seasons,’ he says.

They circle the ever-climbing spire, corkscrewing their
way up that luminous thread. They have left the other fliers far below. Few go
this high; the air thins and the uprising thermals turn turbulent, and the
danger of accidentally trangressing the overlying zone boundary cannot be
neglected. When he looks down, the others are no more than gliding motes of
pastel light. They look very far below, slow-moving coloured flecks caught in
lazy eddies. He feels a twitch of vertigo. It’s a deep, rational phobia and
it’s never been completely excised from the human brain. Even the birds, which
sometimes accompany the angels, must feel it occasionally. No flying thing is
ever truly unafraid of falling, but without that basal fear, flight itself
would be as dull as floating in the sea.

‘I’ve never been this high before,’ he tells her.

‘And we’ve never been as deep as we’re about to go. Aren’t
you excited?’

‘I thought I would be. But that was when it was a distant
possibility, not something about to happen.’

‘Second thoughts?’

‘Honest qualms. Don’t tell me you don’t feel the same
way.’

‘It’s something special, what we’re doing. Something that
will benefit us all. Not just the angels, but all of Spearpoint. Something to
be proud of.’

‘That’s what I keep telling myself.’

‘It will all be fine,’ she says. ‘It will all be fine and
we’ll fly again, both of us.’

And she does something that stops his heart. Collapses her
wings, surrendering lift, allowing herself to drop like a stone, gathering
speed with the pull of gravity, becoming a bright falling jewel. He has only a
moment to evaluate the situation, realising that even with his propulsion pack
he will struggle to catch her unless he also collapses his wings and minimises
drag, when she snatches herself out of the dive, whipping her wings out to
maximum extension again, gathering the wind into them, laughing into his head
with the wild exuberance of what she has done. He has seen her fall like that
before, but each and every time he fears that she will not be able to recover.

‘You shouldn’t do that.’

‘I like falling,’ she says, as if that is all the
explanation required.

They continue flying, but now there is an unease, a sense
that they have overstayed their welcome. They don’t talk. He wishes she hadn’t
fallen; wishes also that he had not chided her for doing so. But it’s too late
now and as the evening draws in, the other angels pull nearer to Spearpoint,
abandoing the cold airs to birds.

They land on one of the balconies, he with a touch of
clumsiness, she flaring her wings at just the right instant to arrest her
approach. And for a moment they caress, just another two lovers returning from
the sky, nothing to distinguish them from any of the other angels returning to
the warmth and light of the Celestial Levels.

‘It’s time,’ she says, and he nods.

They go deep into the Levels. They pass through the golden
plazas and light-filled atria. They fly when it suits them, and ride platforms
and transit baubles when it does not. Through the bowers and vaults of the
public volumes, through security screens both subtle and overt, into the
windowless warrens and corridors of Measures. Measures is the closest thing to
a security organisation in the Celestial Levels; they both work there. It has
been their home for many years, and they both feel safer within its cordon.
Measures has taken very good care of both of them, for they are valued. But
even Measures holds secrets within itself.

There is an annex, a series of rooms, within which angels
will be stripped of their angelhood and remade into prehumans. They make their
way to these rooms, passing through ever more stringent controls, until the
necessary clearance has been authorised. They are so used to this process that
it doesn’t even bore them any more. It’s like breathing. And the one thing they
don’t doubt is the need for secrecy.

They join the other two, who are already waiting outside
the transformation theatre. Beyond something like glass, stainless machinery –
an intricate jellyfish of knives and lasers - waits poised over the padded,
open chassis of a kind of operating table. In a little while the tools will cut
and slice and cauterize, and a little while after that – when the cellular and
neurological transformations are complete, and the memories established, - four
of them will go deep. He feels the anxious scrutiny of the other volunteers;
even that of his lover. They know that only he understands the protocol in its
entirety. That he will be travelling with him is only the smallest of
consolations. If something goes wrong down there, something biomedical,
something he hasn’t allowed for, there won’t be a great deal he can do.

‘I will submit to the machinery first,’ he tells the
others. ‘Then I will guide the rest of you through the transformation. We will
work quickly, and we will continue with the procedure once it is initiated.
There will be no option to change our minds. It’s much too late for that now.
But understand that this is the only beginning. Months of adaptation lie ahead
of us. None of it will be pleasant. Much of it will be painful and traumatic.
But you have my assurance that it is all reversible. When we have completed our
mission … it can all be undone.’

‘Except the memories,’ she says.

‘New ones will fill the place of the old.’

‘But they won’t be the same.’

‘This is how it must happen. There is no other way, if we
are to function down there. If we are to integrate, to pass as them.’

It’s the hardest part, in truth. The stripping away of
what he is, the changing into something new, is a purely mechanical process.
But to live in Neon Heights, not just to survive, but to pass as prehumans,
will require more than just cosmetic and physiological alteration. Their
memories of life in the Celestial Levels will be suppressed, buried under a
skein of lies, lies picked out of the dying brains of those who have travelled
to the levels on their Ascension Day. When the new memories have fully
integrated, the volunteers will feel as if they have always lived in Neon
Heights. They will remember the Celestial Levels, and they will remember the
purpose of their mission. But anything not strictly essential will be allowed
to wither. Even their names will be superfluous from this point on. They will
take on new ones, and they will feel as if they have always known them. They
will remember friends and lovers and mothers and fathers, neighborhoods and
jobs and television shows and subway advertisements. They will remember the
smell of shoe leather and aftershave, cigarettes and cheap perfume, the ozone
crackle of electric trains.

He’d feel horror if he didn’t believe in the cause. Even
with that belief, he feels a terrible trepidation. But it will be worth it, he
assures himself. What they are embarking on is dangerous in the extreme. But
the higher purpose it serves is unquestionably noble. The zones are a prison,
not just for the angels but for the prehumans as well. But only the angels –
only Measures – has the means to do something about it. With surgical
modification, and the right drugs, an angel should now be able to tolerate conditions
that would otherwise kill it. That’s the work he has dedicated years of his
life to bringing to fruition. But by its very nature, it can’t be tested in the
Celestial Levels. Nor can the knowledge of the process – even its existence -
be shared with the adjoining zones. The angels maintain cordial relations with
much of Spearpoint, but on some level they’ll always be feared and distrusted.
No one can know that they now have the means to walk among the wingless.

So the process must be tested in secret, and that means
that a party of angels must live as prehumans, until such time as the
effectivess of the process has been evaluated. They will interact with the
local population only as needed, and at all times with the utmost caution.
Their identity cannot be known.

But when the work is done, what then? He believes that,
ultimately, the project will be to the betterment of all of Spearpoint. Even if
it can only ever be made to work on angels, there would be incalculable benefit
in having at least one portion of the populace able to move freely, without
being bound by the zones. Angels could serve as agents, couriers, free-roving
specialists in universal medicine. In times of disaster or catastrophic zone
change, angels could provide vital assistance. Corpuscles in the body public,
keeping the city alive.

It will be for the best. It never even occurs to him to
doubt this.

‘I’m ready,’ he says, and passes into the sterile hum of
the transformation theatre. He lies down on the padded chassis, allowing his
wings to fall through slots in the table. He supervised the design of the
transformation machinery, and it was his decision that the operation should be
initiated not by the surgeon, but by the subject. Once he has issued that
mental command, though, there will be no means of revoking it.

He thinks of all he now is, all he is about to lose. It
would be intolerable were it not for one fact: she is going with him. And that
changes everything.

He gives the command. The process begins. The table
enfolds him and rotates his body through one hundred and eighty degrees, until
he is flat on his belly. There’s a momentary coldness near the base of his
spine and then the pain is eclipsed. He hears the whisking arms as they toil to
remake him, a sound like knives being sharpened against each other, but even
when they begin to cut away his wings, he feels nothing except a vague itch.
The work – this basic, preliminary work – is conducted with merciless
efficiently. Yet for all his intimate knowledge of the process, he’s still
taken aback when the arms fall silent and the table returns him to a resting
position.

He lies there, appalled by the knowledge of what he has
done to himself, exhilerated by the thought of what lies ahead. And then the
theatre admits her and she comes to his side and touches an angelic hand
against his cheek.

‘It went well,’ she says.

‘There’s nothing to be frightened of,’ he answers. Then,
on a whim: ‘Show me my wings, will you?’

‘Are you sure?’ But she doesn’t wait for an answer. She
collects the severed wings from the suspension tray where the system placed
them, tipping them to allow the preservative nutrient to run off in greasy
rivulets. She brings them to his side, holding them delicately, and allows him
to touch their sleek translucence. He traces their filigreed mysteries. They
have been severed very skillfully. Bone, muscle, nerve and circulatory
reconnection will be uncomplicated. There’s a long history of that, just as
there’s a long history of regrowing wings from scratch.

‘They’re just tissue,’ she says. ‘They don’t make us what
we are.’

‘I know.’

‘And we’ll fly again. The two of us. When all this is
over.’

He closes his eyes and whispers: ‘Destroy my wings.’

#2

When he returns to the safe house for the last time – and
it will be the last time; he intends only to collect what he needs and then go
to ground elsewhere in Neon Heights – he parks the slot car a block away and
walks the rest of the distance, vigilant for any signs of change, anything that
was different the last time. They could easily have got here by now, he thinks.
If the other two were reporting back to the Celestial Levels, then it’s
entirely possibly that their handlers – whoever is controlling them – now
realise that something has happened. Who knows what contingency plans were put
in place, in the event that something went wrong with the infiltration program?
Not Aruval, for she would have said something. And definitely not Quillon, for
it’s clear now that he was never meant to know the full extent of the mission’s
objectives.

It’s a rainy morning and nothing about the safe house, or
the surrounding streets, suggests anything amiss. Except for every single
detail looking malevolently off-key, every familiar thing now causing him to
question the reliability of his memory. Was that window in the opposite
tenement always shuttered? Was the loading bay open or closed when he was here
the last time? Would there normally be this many cars parked on the other side
of the street at this time of day? And those dustbins under the rain-dripping,
candy-striped awning of the clocksmith – shouldn’t they have been emptied by
Hygiene and Works, at least a day ago?

But he tells himself it can only be his imagination; that
nothing in these quotidian details is in any way out of place. It’s just
another wet morning in Neon Heights. He won’t come back here, not after today,
but there’s still time to get in and out.

He enters the apartment building, checks the pigeonholes
for mail. Presses the call button and waits for the creaking electric elevator
to grind down to the lobby. The building’s half deserted – it’s in a crumbling,
low-rent district – and no one’s around as he digs out the key and lets himself
into the rooms where the four of them used to live. Rain pitter-patters on the
roof over his head. Other than that it’s silent and still. He can’t hear a
whisper of traffic through the grimed-over windows.

He goes into the back room. The drugs and testing devices
are still there. He snaps open an empty briefcase and sharts shovelling them
in. He has no idea how much he really needs. If he has to stay down here for
more than a few months, these medicines won’t be enough to keep him alive. But
without them, he won’t survive more than three or four weeks. Best to take what
he can.

He snaps shut the briefcase and surveys the miserable,
sepia-coloured surroundings. Angels slept on these dingey mattresses; they sat
around that lopsided dining table and talked of the day’s activities under a
brown-flickering light bulb. Sometimes they smoked local cigarettes and drank
prehuman alcohol, testing the limits of their new metabolisms, seeing how well
they could blend in, taking a childish delight in intoxication. Sometimes they
would listen to the wireless, to the scratchy, tinny sounds that passed for
music in Neon Heights, or gaze at the pale strobing rectangle of a wooden-cased
television set. What the other two did repulses him, and if he’d known their
intentions he would have gladly killed them before they murdered Aruval. But he
remembers sitting at the table, laughing and smiling along with them. Making
prehuman noises and faces, as if they’d been born to it.

Should he take the automatic? He doesn’t know. He never
used it. He was never even trained to use it. He was the doctor, the
transformation specialist. He doesn’t really want the gun because implicit in
the understanding that the gun would make him safer is the possibility that he
might at some point have cause to use it.

He slides open the bed-side drawer. He’s almost relieved
to note that the automatic’s gone. At least that will free him from considering
any course of action where the gun might be a necessity.

He hefts the briefcase. He’s been listening intently and
no one has used the elevator since his arrival. There’s nothing else here he
needs. All he has to do now is lock up and leave.

That’s when he thinks: why was the elevator on the top
floor?

It would never have troubled him before; it would mean
only that one of the others must have returned while he was out on some errand.
But there are no others now. And hardly anyone ever comes and goes from the
other rooms on the top floor.

He’s still thinking about it, trying to find an
explanation that doesn’t place him in jeopardy, when he hears the soft,
deliberate click of a safety catch.

He’s a policeman. Quillon knows this instantly. He’s
dressed in plainclothes, heavy grey raincoat over a heavy business suit, but
it’s in the curve of his body as he leans against the doorframe, the laconic
way he holds the gun – aimed not at Quillon, but at Quillon’s general location
in the room, as if that’s enough. And maybe it is. Quillon doesn’t even think
of trying to run. He just waits for the big man in the doorway to make the next
move.

‘I said raise your hands.’

Quillon does as he’s told. ‘What’s the problem?’ he asks quietly,
as any reasonable man might.

The big man scratches at stubble and the bags under his
eyes. He’s got the rumpled look of someone who hasn’t seen a bed lately. Or
much in the way of soap and hot water. For all that, he’s still a commanding
presence. Quillon knows that even if the other man were unarmed, he wouldn’t
have a hope in hell of getting past him. Angels are fast, but they’re not
strong.

‘You got any compelling reason to have been near the
Second District refuse dump at around three this morning?’

Quillon blinks and tries to look as if the question has left
him puzzled rather than startled. ‘The Second District dump? I don’t even know
where that is. What would I have been doing there anyway?’

‘I’ve had you under observation,’ the big man says. ‘For a
few days now. You’ve been of interest to me.’

‘I can’t understand why.’

The big man thinks about this for a moment. ‘We found the
body.’

‘What body?’

He gives a pained smile, as if he’s reached the limit of
something. ‘Let’s give up the charade, shall we? The woman at the bottom of the
elevator shaft, in the Allied Pharmaceuticals warehouse. Night watchman found
her in the end. I took the call. It was hard work getting to the body – which
is why I figured you had no choice but to leave her there and hope no one
noticed, at least for a while.’ He nods the barrel of the gun, which is a
revolver, not the missing automatic. Quillon notices a micro-tremor in the
man’s grip. ‘But I see you’re packing now. Thinking of moving on, by any
chance?’

‘I don’t know about this woman.’

‘That’s odd, because we tied her to this apartment. Found
a stub on her, a repair chit for the clocksmith across the road.’ He looks
around at the many dumb, silent clocks. Only a handful are still keeping time
now. ‘A lot of clocks in here, even for Neon Heights. You itchy about
something?’

‘I don’t know about a clock either.’

‘Well, this woman did. She must have taken one in to be fixed.
Got the repair chit, but never went back to claim the clock. Of course, the
chit gave us the address of the clocksmith.’

‘Proving nothing. There must be a thousand people using
that shop.’

‘Yeah, maybe. Trouble is the clocksmith specifically
mentioned seeing her coming and going from this building. Said she was
striking.’

‘I still don’t know her.’

‘That’s odd. I did some further digging around and found
witnesses that tied her to this floor. Said that she wasn’t usually alone.
Sometimes with a man, sometimes with a man and a women. Sometimes three of
them. Coming and going at weird hours of the day, hardly ever talking to
anyone. Getting warm?’

‘I’m sorry that this women died,’ Quillon said, and fights
to hold back the emotion, because for the first time it’s hitting him that she
died falling, dropping like a severed counterweight down that elevator shaft.
He thinks of her collapsing her wings, plummeting through Spearpoint’s cold
airs on the last day they ever flew together. The wild gleeful shriek as she
recovered from the fall. ‘But I didn’t know her.’

‘And the other woman, whoever she was? The other man? Any
idea who they might have been?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘So you just live here on your own?’

Quillon stammers out the answer, because he knows how ludricrous
it will seem. ‘Yes.’ Because even a stupid local cop can see that these rooms
were once occupied by more than one person.

‘I know you’re lying. I also know that there are body
parts in those bags you’ve been ferrying to the dump. You cut them up in here?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘We shipped the woman to the Third District Morgue. I’ve
got a friend works there, agreed to look her over. Calls me back a couple hours
later and tells me what he’s cutting open isn’t like anything he’s seen before.
You know anything about that?’

‘I don’t.’

‘Says she’s an angel. Or something like it. Made to look
like one of us, but only on the outside. And that’s when my blood runs cold,
because it’s the last thing I need.’

‘I’m sorry for you.’

‘You any idea of the shitstorm that’s coming down on my
head if I file a report that says an angel was living incognito in Neon
Heights? That’s big news, my friend. The kind that could embarrass a lot of
people. The police chiefs trying to tell everyone they’ve got this city under
control. The men in the chamber of commerce keen to keep doing business with
the Levels. Any number of causes who don’t want it known that angels are
operating down here, under our noses.’

‘I can imagine it might cause difficulties.’

‘The kind that can end a career. Not that that would stop
me, if I really believed a crime had taken place here. But if I had reason to
think that this was just some … business … some … altercation … between angels,
that happened to be conducted on our turf … that might change things.
Technically speaking, I’m not even sure that it would continue to be a criminal
investigation at that point.’

‘Again, I’d love to help.’

‘Let me tell you what’s going to happen,’ the man says,
pausing to dig his little finger into a gap in his teeth. ‘It’s one of two
things. Either you’re going to give me an explanation of what went on in that
warehouse, and what’s up with the body bags, or I’m going to proceed on the
basis that a human crime was committed here. And arrest you and take you down
to the station. I’ver got a car outside. Two other men in the car, ready to
meet me.’

‘If this was the work of angels,’ Quillon says, ‘why would
you not care?’

‘It’s not that I don’t care. It’s not that I relish the
thought of those cold-blooded sonsof bitches sneaking around down here passing
themselves off as us. It’s just that I’m smart enough to know when something’s
not my problem. And this is very much not my problem.’ He looks Quillon in the
eye, the man’s eyes sleepy and not quite focused, but still with an
interrogator’s intensity to them. ‘So do we have an explanation, or do we not?’

There’s a moment that encompasses lifetimes. He knows that
he’s reached an impasse, a point where he has no choice but to take this man at
his word. He cannot escape, he cannot lie. To be taken into custody would
surely result in the kind of close physical examination that would mean his
identity being exposed. At the very least, he would be denied access to the
antizonal medicines necessary for continued existence this far from the
Celestial Levels, and the ensuing sickness would be just as revealing as any
examination.

But to place his absolute, unconditional trust in a man he
never set eyes on until five minutes ago?

He has no choice but to do exactly that.

‘I didn’t kill the woman,’ Quillon says.

‘That was sort of my hunch. But you did know her?’

‘Of course. You know it, so what’s the point in lying?’ At
one and the same moment, Quillon feels both an enormous relief and a terrible
feeling that he has stepped off the edge of something, without wings to bear
him up. ‘Her name was Aruval. And yes, your friend in the morgue was correct.
She is – was – an angel.’

‘And the same goes for you and the two you cut up.’

Quillon looks down. Now that he has to articulate what he
has done, the words don’t come easily. ‘I killed them after they murdered
Aruval. I was meant to be keeping them alive. They relied on me for that. But I
altered the dosage to put them into a state of paralysis, and then I used more
medicines to kill them.’

‘You want to tell me why all this happened?’

‘It’ll take a while.’

‘Do you come out of it smelling of shit or roses?’

‘I guess that’ll be for you to decide.’ Quillon pauses.
‘We came here to do something good. Aruval and I believed that. But we were
wrong. That’s why they killed her. And that’s why I had to kill them.’

‘Tit for tat.’

‘I’d have been next, once they convinced themselves they
didn’t need my expertise.’

The man glances past Quillon to the table. ‘Whatever that
is, pour me a shot of it. We’re not going anywhere fast.’

Quillon does as the man tells him, handing him the glass
even as the man still has the gun on him.

‘If I tell you everything, and you still take me in, where
does that get me?’

‘Exactly where you’d be, just quicker. You’ll just have to
trust me when I say I don’t want to get involved in angel business. And I’ll
have to trust that you’re not spinning me a lie. Puts us in the same boat, sort
of.’

‘If you say so.’

‘You want to start with your name?’

‘Quillon.’

‘Sounds local.’

‘It is. And I don’t remember my real name. It was scrubbed
from my memory when they sent us down here. And you’d be, who exactly?’

‘Fray,’ the man says off-handedly, as if he’s given away
nothing of value. ‘Not that it matters to you. You and me, we won’t be doing
continued business. If I like your story, you’re out the door and we never see
each other again. If I don’t, it’s down to the station and you’ll be snatched
away from me faster than I can blink.’

And Quillon notices again the slight tremor in the man’s
big fisted hand, the nervous quiver of the meniscus against the sides of the
glass.

‘Maybe we could help each other,’ Quillon says.

Fray takes a big gulp from the glass. ‘Somehow I doubt
it.’

#3

Through a gap in the dust-caked blinds he watches the
slot-car pull up outside the apartment. He’s been standing there for most of
the night, keeping vigil. He can’t say why. It’s not as if he knew something
was going to happen, because if that had been the case he would never have
allowed Aruval to go with them. And if he had believed her, truly believed her,
instead of telling her that they would wait until they had more evidence, then
perhaps she would not have gone with them either. Together, Aruval and he could
have done something. They could have confronted the other two, forced them into
an admission of their real intentions. But now the car comes back, wheels
off-slot, halts at the curb, and only two raincoated figures emerge. For a
moment one of them holds the passenger door open and he thinks she might still
be about to emerge, that all might be well, but then the door is slammed, and
the two figures walk across the puddled, rain-spattered pavement and out of
view into the lobby. A minute or so passes. Time for a last, frantic, whispered
exchange. Working out what they’re going to say to him. Getting their story
right. They’ve had the whole of the journey home to talk about it but it’s
never enough. And then he hears the labouring whine of the elevator, bringing
them up to the top floor. And thinks: they’ll be ready to kill me. If they have
even the slightest suspicion that I know, it’s over. They’ve seen how the
medications work. They can self-administer, if it comes to a choice between
that and the mission being fatally compromised.

So he cannot let even a glimmer of skepticism show. Even
though he knows, with bitter certainty, that they have killed Aruval.

The elevator arrives; he hears the dying whine of the
motor and the iron clunk of its heavy doors. Footsteps along the hall, squishy
with wet soles. Key in the door.

He lets the gap in the blind close tight, and returns to
the table where he has been preparing the next batch of antizonals. It’s not
hard to force his composure into one of acute disinterest. The one thing none
of them are good at is making faces, and on the few occasions when he’s been
outside Quillon has found the effort quite remarkably taxing. Inside the
apartment, they’re all glad not to have to blend in, not to have keep striking
the right note. Like overstretched rubber masks, their faces are keen to snap
back into expressionless neutrality. Even their voices turn duller, like actors
reading a script for timing, not effect.

‘You’ve been gone a while,’ he says, because it’s true and
exactly what he ought to say.

‘You know we had work to do,’ says Baston, shaking the
rain off his hat before hanging it up.

‘Did you get to the warehouse?’ They had gone to Allied
Pharmaceuticals, to steal drugs necessary for their continued existence in Neon
Heights.

‘We couldn’t get inside,’ Glaive says. ‘Too much security,
too many lights on inside. It’s not normally like that. We’ll try again
tomorrow.’

‘We need those antizonals.’

They had come down from the Levels with all the medicines
that they could bring, but actual immersion in the zone is proving more costly
than expected. Now the original supplies have been all but exhausted, and they
must scavenge and improvise. The raid on the warehouse – supposedly poorly
patrolled at night – was meant to have solved their problems for weeks.

‘And we’ll try again,’ Glaive repeats. ‘What is it with
you, Quillon? Don’t you know we did our best?’

He looks beyond her, to the hall. ‘Where’s Aruval? Didn’t
she come up with you?’

‘No, she’s still out there,’ Baston says, too casually.

Quillon dredges his mind for the appropriate response. ‘On
her own? Since when was that protocol?’

Glaive says: ‘You know it is with Aruval. Hard to talk
round once she gets an idea into her head.’

‘She decided to go and buy some over-the counter
antizonals, using local cash,’ Baston says.

‘That’s not how it’s meant to happen. She’ll have to fill
out forms, state the reason for needing the drugs. You know tightly they
control the dispensaries.’

‘Yes,’ Glaive says patiently. ‘So do we all. So did
Aruval. But she also knew we needed the medicines.’

‘And you let her go in alone?’

‘Better one of us take the risk, than all three,’ Baston
says. ‘She understood that. And it’s just a one-off. We’re not establishing a
pattern here. We’re not doing anything that will lead the authorities to the
safe house.’

‘You hope.’

Baston’s demeanour is still rigorously calm. ‘Look, it’s
easy for you. You hardly ever go out, hardly ever have to interact with the
prehumans. We don’t have that luxury. And we certainly don’t have the luxury of
being able to function without medicines. All Aruval’s doing is buying us some
time in case we can’t get into the warehouse for a few days.’

‘Our supplies aren’t that low,’ Quillon says, but refrains
from adding anything because he doesn’t want them to think he doesn’t believe
their story. Only that he doubts the wisdom of it, which is something else.
‘You shouldn’t have let her go off alone,’ he says.

‘We tried to talk her out of it,’ Glaive answers. ‘You
know how it is.’

‘I suppose.’ He looks around the room’s choir of clocks,
their synchronised dials alert to the slightest hint of zone instability. They
must be on guard at all times. What would inconvenience a local could prove
rapidly fatal to an angel, for all their adaptations. ‘Well, when is she due
back?’

‘It’s still early,’ Glaive said. ‘She’ll have a long wait
until the dispensaries open.’ She glances at Baston, as if cross-checking a
detail of their story. ‘I’ll be surprised if she makes it back much before
noon. You should get some rest, Quillon. There’s no sense waiting up now.’

‘I need to finish these preparations.’

‘Don’t worry about Aruval,’ Baston says. ‘She can take
care of herself.’

‘I know.’

He doesn’t rest, but continues to occupy himself with the
antizonals, cutting and mixing, diluting and crystallising, testing against
locally-sourced reagents and a dozen caged mice purchased from a grubby pet
shop in the Second District. Of course the mice are acclimatized to life in
Neon Heights but they can still be used to gauge the crude efficacy of the
drugs, the severity of likely side-effects. Every day Quillon examines his
colleagues, watchful for the creeping onset of Massive Maladaptive Trauma. They
are all susceptible to some degree. They aren’t meant to be alive down here;
all the transformations have done is allow them to survive with the aid of
medicines. None of the angels are exactly alike in their responses, and each
day the individual dosage must be recalculated. The work is complicated,
requiring constant, scrupulous diligence. He makes the others perform tests of
numbing repetetiveness. He has them read from cards, hold long lists in
short-term memory, recite numeric sequences, catch falling objects when he lets
them drop between his fingers. He shines lights into their eyes and pushes
needles into reflex sites. He runs equally demanding tests on himself, with the
other angels’ assistance. He computes dosages against graphs drawn in notepads
from memory.

All the time, though, he’s aware that the others are
learning. They don’t have his expertise and never will. But they’re intelligent
– they wouldn’t be on the mission if they were not – and they can follow the
outline of a process. They know the kinds of drugs they would need to source,
and if they were forced to make their own preparations, they probably know
enough to at least not kill themselves.

He wonders if they’ve realised it yet, and if not, how
long it will take them.

He decides not to wait until Aruval is clearly late from
her drug-procuring errand. In the mid-morning, as is his routine, he runs
another battery of tests, calculates dosages, and selects the right strength of
antizonals. Or at least appears to do. This is the moment of maximum risk, when
he relies on sleight of hand to give himself the right dose and the other two
something not right at all. He has to act quickly, but not so quickly that it
looks odd. If the effects show in Baston before he gets to Glaive, she will
turn on him.

‘Lie down,’ Quillon says, with plausible urgency. ‘I doubt
that it’s anything serious. Your readings were a little on the limit; it’s
possible I may need to give you a corrective dosage.’

‘This hasn’t happened before,’ Baston says, lying down on
one of the beds, muscular stiffness already apparent to Quillon’s eyes.

‘We’re in uncharted territory now, so I’m afraid this kind
of thing is likely to happen more and more. But it’s perfectly within my
abilities to correct for slight miscalculations. I just need to keep you under
observation for a few minutes, and then I can … ’

‘What have you done?’ Glaive asks, and he turns round and
sees her standing there, looking down at her hand, palm to the ceiling, the
hand tremoring wildly.

‘Nothing!’ Quillon says. ‘I just followed the usual … ’

‘But you’re all right.’

‘One of the samples may have been incorrectly strengthed.
Again, I can correct for it. Lie down, with Baston.’

‘This feels wrong. You’ve overshot before and it didn’t
feel like this.’

‘My chest is tightening,’ Baston says, the first hint of
panic breaking through his voice.

Glaive stumbles towards the door, towards her coat and the
gun she must still be keeping there. She doesn’t reach it. Her left leg
stiffens, the right buckles under her. She falls to the floor, crashing her
head against the leg of a chair. ‘Quillon,’ she says, trying to force herself
back up again. ‘What did you … ’

He’s past the point of pretence now, and they know it. The
figure on the bed is choking, looking at him with wide, fear-filled eyes.
Baston is nearly paralysed; Glaive will soon follow. He returns to his table
and the prepared medicines, and sets about loading two syringes.

‘I want you to tell me what really happened,’ he says.
Baston, by this point, can’t even breathe, let alone speak. Quillon continues
softly: ‘Aruval knew something, didn’t she? She came to me, told me there was something
she wasn’t happy about, something that concerned the true purpose of this
mission. She said there was an agenda, a directive, that she and I were not
aware of.’

‘Quillon,’ Glaive says again, but this time about all she
can manage is a strangulated gurgle.

‘She’d seen the two of you conspiring, when you didn’t
think you were being observed. She’d seen you returning from errands to
different parts of the city than the ones you were meant to go to.’

He moves over to the bed, to Baston. By now the male angel
is completely still, in a state superficially indistinguishable from death. He
cannot breathe, and his heart will stop soon unless the paralysis is eased.
Quillon draws up Baston’s sleeve and injects just the right amount. Then he
moves to Glaive, who is still on the floor, and repeats the procedure.

‘I should have listened to her,’ Quillon says. ‘Instead I
told her it was normal to feel feelings of paranoia after prolonged exposure to
high-strength antizonals. I told her that if there really was something going
on, I’d have noticed it. And that if I was going to believe her, I’d need
something concrete. Is that what happened? Did she confront you out there, when
you were supposed to be breaking into Allied Pharmaceuticals?’

‘We told you,’ Baston says, able to croak out a few words
even as the drugs pin him to the bed. ‘Couldn’t break into the warehouse. Too
much security.’

‘And that was the last you saw of her? She went off to buy
the drugs over the counter?’

‘Yes.’ But there’s something desperate and hopeless in
Baston’s answer. Even if it’s the truth, knows it’s not going to be enough to
assuage Quillon.

‘I think you’re lying,’ Quillon tells him. ‘I think you
two decided that Aruval was an operational risk, an impediment to the success
of whatever it was you were meant to be doing down here.’

‘You’re wrong,’ says Glaive.

‘Very well.’

He moves back to the table, empties the syringes and
reloads them, this time drawing from different vials.

It’s perhaps only then – before the work is complete –
that the truth really hits him. He hasn’t just lost Aruval, as certain as he is
of that fact. He’s lost everything else as well. Because if Aruval was right –
and he has by now more or less committed himself to that possibility – then
there can be no hope of him returning to the Celestial Levels. The people who
sent him, the people he trusted, either lied to him or were themselves lied to.
Either way, there is no safe haven there. If it has not already happened, he is
about to become an inconvenient detail in someone else’s scheme. Baston and
Glaive have robbed him of more than his lover. They have stolen the place that
made him, the only part of Spearpoint that will ever feel like home. He thinks
back to the last time he flew with Aruval, that cooling evening before his
wings were snipped away, his glib certainty that he would not need them again,
that he could always grow new ones when he returned. Strange that he remembers
that so well, when he doesn’t even recall his own name. But at the time even
losing his name seemed no more than a necessary inconvenience, something that
could be put right when he returned at mission’s end.

But now there will never be a mission’s end.

‘I want to know what this is all about,’ he says, moving
to Glaive. ‘You are going to die; that’s not up for debate. There aren’t enough
drugs in the whole of Allied Pharmaceuticals to undo the damage I’ve already
done. And it’s going to be slow, and it’s going to hurt. You can trust me on
that. I know more about the relationship between pain receptors and zone
sickness than anyone on this planet. I can, however, alleviate that pain.’ He
pushes the mask of his face into a smile. ‘To some degree. I can make it
quicker, too. To some degree. But only if I feel I’m getting truthful answers
to my questions.’

There is terror in Glaive’s eyes. He is fairly certain
that she wasn’t expecting to die this day, and by his hand. He holds the
syringe up to the window, daylight seeping through the blinds, and taps a
finger against the glass barrel to eliminate bubbles.

Followers

About Me

I'm Alastair Reynolds, a science fiction writer based in Wales. I used to work for the European Space Agency, before turning to full-time writing. I have written fifteen novels and well over sixty short stories. I have been nominated for some awards and won one or two. I used to be on Twitter but now I'm not.
This is my working blog; you can also find a bit more about me and my writing by going to my author website at www.alastairreynolds.com
You can call me Al.